PDE Storing the Data Practice Question
A marketing team needs to run ad-hoc SQL queries on terabytes of clickstream data stored in Parquet files in Cloud Storage. They want a serverless solution with no cluster management and the ability to query external data without loading. Which service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates choose Dataproc with Spark SQL (Option C) because it can query Parquet files, but they overlook the 'serverless' and 'no cluster management' requirement, which BigQuery satisfies natively without any cluster provisioning.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
BigQuery with external tables
BigQuery with external tables allows querying data stored in Cloud Storage (including Parquet files) without loading it into BigQuery storage, providing a serverless, fully managed solution with no cluster management. This matches the requirement for ad-hoc SQL queries on terabytes of clickstream data in Parquet format, as BigQuery automatically scales compute and storage.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Cloud SQL
Why it's wrong here
Cloud SQL is a managed relational database, not serverless for analytics on external files.
- ✗
AlloyDB
Why it's wrong here
AlloyDB is a PostgreSQL-compatible database, not designed for serverless queries on external data.
- ✗
Dataproc with Spark SQL
Why it's wrong here
Dataproc requires managing a cluster; not serverless.
- ✓
BigQuery with external tables
Why this is correct
BigQuery external tables let you query Parquet files in GCS without loading, serverless.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PDE question is part of Courseiva's 890-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PDE practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PDE exam.